ScoMo and his 80s alternatives
FOUR-AND-A-BIT months after he got the top job, the nation is still trying to get to grips with Scott Morrison. Exactly what sort of a man is he?
From his TV and YouTube appearances, you could be forgiven for thinking our new PM is a daggy suburban dad prone to spicing up his sentences with anachronistic Australianisms and — to Victorian ears, anyway — bewildering references to rugby league and a place called “the Shire”.
The last is not, as the rest of Australia might have assumed, a nod to Bilbo Baggins, but a reference to Sunderland Shire, the area of southern Sydney which takes in Morrison’s seat of Cook.
From what one can glean about Cook from its representation in the pioneering reality-TV show Sylvania Waters, and more lately The Shire, it would seem to a place where you wouldn’t want to be seen to be getting too far ahead of yourself.
No doubt this is partly why Morrison is keen to portray himself as the average Aussie.
But judging by the Spotify playlist he released in November, it would seem Morrison’s musical tastes owe more to his youth in the inner eastern beachside suburb of Bronte and his time at Sydney Boys’ High School than to his time as the MP for Cook.
At the time “Eighties Plus” — since renamed “ScoMo’s Global Eighties” — was unveiled, the list copped a lot of criticism for its lack of Australian artists, which struck me as rather unfair. In response, he later released a second list of Australian music — largely pub rock — which didn’t really placate his critics because this one was notable for the absence of women.
You could argue that in his role as our nation’s leader, Morrison should give a nod to local industries and a balance of genders. Or, to put it in Lefty-speak, his lists are “significant as they give us some insight into what our Prime Minister sees as valuable in popular culture”.
But I would much rather know what music Morrison actually enjoys than have him pretend to like stuff he doesn’t — as Daniel Andrews did a couple of years ago when he posted a picture based on an album cover of someone called Drake (I’d never heard of him) but later couldn’t name one of his songs.
And the list, itself, was very revealing, especially, if like Morrison and me, you were a teenager in the 1980s.
Back then, the biggest divide was between those who listened to mainstream music and those of us who listened to what was rather pretentiously called “alternative”.
In Sydney, the alternative station in those days was JJJ — which didn’t make it down here until the end of the decade — and from Morrison’s list, it’s pretty clear that’s what he was listening to when he was at school.
You can tell that from the presence of The Smiths. Back then The Smiths — even more than The Cure, another ScoMo fave — were the fault line on which mainstream and alternative tastes fractured. Your attitude to Morrissey — the band’s fey, twee, vegetarian and sexually ambiguous lead singer, was a litmus test for which team you were on. That is if you’d even heard of them, because for much of the decade, you couldn’t find their records, such as This Charming Man and The Boy With The Thorn In His Side — in most suburban record shops in Melbourne.
Morrison doesn’t have one Smiths song on his list, he’s got a bunch of them — which suggests he actually dug them back them.
Another giveaway that he was an alternative — rather than a mainstream — fan in his youth is the way the list skews towards the UK.
Most American music just wasn’t seen as cool in Australia in the 1980s, aside from a few bands like the Husker Du and the Dead Kennedys — that didn’t change until grunge arrived in the 1990s.
Aside from The Cure and The Smiths, Morrison’s UK music taste runs to The Pet Shop Boys, Soft Cell, Depeche Mode, Yazoo, New Order, Spandau Ballet, ABC, The Style Council, Eurythmics, The Thompson Twins, The Clash, The Cult and The Psychedelic Furs. (Another dead giveaway that ScoMo was not a MMM listener: no Dire Straits.)
This makes me wonder if the young Morrison was a reader of the NME — or even the UK style bible of that decade, The Face. Did he have a floppy fringe when he was at school? What movies did he like? I think we should be told.